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Efraim Zuroff
At a dramatic Budapest press conference
on September 28, Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, announced that he had tracked down
a wanted war criminal who had been involved in one of the
most infamous acts of mass murder committed in Hungary during
World War II. Zuroff, who also heads the Center's Jerusalem
office, said that Sandor Kepiro, 92, had been a gendarmerie
officer who was twice found guilty but heretofore never punished
for participating in the 1942 Novi Sad massacre, in which
over 1,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were murdered. Here, Zuroff
tells us how he was located.
The hunt began when information reached us in February 2005 about Istvan Bujdoso,
an elderly Hungarian living in Scotland who had bragged about his role as a
master-sergeant of the Hungarian gendarmerie in the deportation of Jews from
Miskolc to Auschwitz. As it turned out, it was Bujdoso’s apparently irrepressible
urge to talk about that “heroic” period of his life that ultimately paved the
way for the discovery of a far senior colleague.
The breakthrough came early this past summer, when Bujdoso told a Scottish journalist,
whom we sent to attempt to elicit vital biographical information from him, that
he was in contact with a much higher-ranked gendarmerie officer named Sandor
Kepiro. In fact, Kepiro had visited him in Scotland two years earlier and the
two comrades were still in phone contact on a regular basis.
As part of its "Operation: Last Chance" project,
launched in cooperation with the Targum Shlishi Foundation of Miami in 2002,
the Wiesenthal Center has spent the last few years in an effort to maximize the
prosecution of Nazi war criminals while it is still possible. So, even if at
the time, the name Kepiro did not ring any bells, it certainly appeared worthy
of investigation.
My first stop was Yad Vashem, whose expert on Hungarian Jewry, Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked,
left no room for doubt: “You mean that bastard is still alive? I don’t believe
it.” He briefed me on Kepiro’s war record, which clearly qualified him as a prime
target for our efforts and explained the unique aspects of his case.
Kepiro was one of several Hungarian army and gendarmerie officers who were prosecuted
in fascist Hungary for their role in one of the two major atrocities carried
out by the Hungarians prior to the Nazi occupation — the mass murder in January
1942 of approximately 1,000 men, women and children (80 percent of whom were
Jews, the others, Serbs and Gypsies) in Novi Sad (Ujvidek in Hungarian), which
had been annexed from Yugoslavia in 1941. This atrocity climaxed a wave of violence
directed by the Hungarians against Serbs and Jews in the Voivodina area (Delvidek
in Hungarian) that month following the annexation, which altogether claimed the
lives of over 3,000 civilian victims.
Kepiro had been convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for his role
in the murders, but the Nazis, who occupied Hungary shortly thereafter, cancelled
his conviction and returned him to service. During the deportations to Auschwitz
in the spring of 1944, he was the highest-ranking gendarmerie officer in Novi
Sad. After the war, in 1946, he was again prosecuted for war crimes by the "People's
Courts," but by this time he had disappeared and his second conviction and sentencing
to 14 years’ imprisonment took place with him in absentia.
Kepiro was a big fish, a doctor of law, and obviously someone who should have
known better than to carry out such blatantly illegal orders. And, in fact, his
1944 verdict tells how he asked for orders in writing when he learned that his
men were to round up and murder innocent civilians, but even though his request
was turned down — "orders
such as these are only transmitted orally" was the response of his superiors — he carried them out faithfully anyway.
What I feared would be a complicated and costly investigation turned out to be
fairly simple. First, I asked Szilvia Dittel and Tibor Pecsi, my trusted helpers
in Hungary, both of whom teach and guide at the new Holocaust museum in Budapest,
to check the local phone book for traces of Kepiro. Sure enough, there were two
Sandor Kepiros listed, as well as one Mrs. Sandor Kepiro. Mrs. Kepiro’s husband,
it transpired, had indeed been in the gendarmerie in the area of Novi Sad, but
he had long been deceased. Bujdoso and our Kepiro had spoken only recently.
At first there was no answer at the other numbers, but Szilvia e-mailed four
hours later that “the real Kepiro” had been found at home in Budapest. Tibor
got our suspect on the phone and, posing as a student at the local Catholic university
who was writing a paper on the gendarmerie, found him very willing to share his
life history (excluding his crimes), including his escape to Austria, flight
to Argentina and return in 1996 to Hungary. He presented his duties in an innocuous
manner — “90 percent teaching and training” — but we knew better.
Unfortunately, Kepiro, who is 92, refused Tibor’s offer to visit, which would
have enabled us to assess his health firsthand, an extremely important point
if we were going to demand that he be imprisoned, but it was clear that he was
extremely lucid and in relatively good shape. “Operation Ujvidek” could now begin
in earnest.
All such operations are nerve-wracking races against time. Lacking the funds
to pay for round-the-clock surveillance, we had to hope that Kepiro would not
realize we were on to him and escape. We also hoped he would not suddenly die
on us. Too many murderers had managed to evade punishment by slipping away, either
into hiding or into their graves.
Making the case against Kepiro was in a sense the easy part, since the crimes
committed at Novi Sad had been well-documented and he had already been convicted
twice. We also received a document from the Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade,
indicating that he had been a wanted criminal in that country. Under these circumstances,
the only question was whether the Hungarian authorities would be willing to implement
either or both of his sentences, which was obviously preferable to a retrial.
What remains a mystery to this day, is how he was able to return to Hungary a
decade ago without facing punishment.
Having, with the help of contacts in Serbia and colleagues at Yad Vashem, collected
quite a bit of documentation on Kepiro's crimes, I asked to meet with the officials
of the Prosecutor General’s office, telling them only that I needed to discuss
a new suspect currently living in Hungary. A meeting was set for August 1, and
I have to admit that I cannot remember ever being so nervous.
The day before the meeting, Szilvia
and Tibor took me on a tram across the Danube from Pest to
Buda, and after alighting we began walking down a pleasant,
if nondescript, street, Frankel Leo utca. This was the street
where Kepiro lived. At his building, No. 78, we saw the name
listed openly at the entrance, as if he was just another
regular law-abiding resident of Budapest and not an escaped
Nazi war criminal with the blood of hundreds on his hands.
As we stood there, many thoughts rushed through my mind,
including thoughts of a particularly ominous nature. What
could have been easier than to get into his apartment and
execute the bastard? In this case, he was not a suspect,
but a convicted war criminal, with a thousand dead Jews and
Serbs to prove it. But thoughts of this nature did not linger,
since I had long ago been convinced, primarily by Simon Wiesenthal
himself, that physical revenge was neither a moral nor practical
option. Killing such people at this late date would be counterproductive
and ruin our efforts in other cases, and besides, the headlines
would not say that a mass murderer had finally received his
just reward, but rather that vengeful Jews had murdered a
lonely nonagenarian.
A large building across the street caught our attention.
Directly opposite Kepiro's house was a synagogue! What could
it be like for a Nazi war criminal to face that every day?
We crossed the avenue to take a closer look, when I saw a
youngish woman emerge from Kepiro’s apartment building.
I urged Szilvia to speak to her, in the hope that she was
a neighbor, and might be able to provide some information
on his health, family, and the like. Szilvia was all smiles
when she rejoined us, having learned that Sandor Kepiro led
an active life and was even the organizer of social events
for residents of his building. What better proof could we
ask for that he was healthy enough to be brought to justice
at long last?
The following day, in my meeting with the Hungarian judicial
authorities, I was informed that the prosecutors had to review
the two verdicts to determine whether Kepiro's sentence could
be immediately implemented or whether they would be required,
because of a statute of limitations, to initiate a new investigation
against him. Nearly two months later, however, Hungarian
officials said they still had not found the original verdicts,
and informed me that it was unlikely that Kepiro's punishment
would be implemented. It was then that I decided the case
had to be made public. This was the only hope that justice
might finally be achieved.
So on September 28, I called a press conference at the synagogue
opposite his house, where I informed approximately two dozen
journalists that twice-convicted war criminal Dr. Sandor
Kepiro had been living unpunished in Budapest ("take
a look out the window to see where he currently resides") for the past decade. We then crossed the street, where I showed them his name
on the bell and they waited for him to arrive.
When asked about the charges, Kepiro delivered an impromptu
speech of about an hour in the street. In it, he initially
admitted that terrible things had happened in Novi Sad but
claimed that he bore no responsibility and had "not
seen a single corpse." Later on, he tried to suggest that perhaps the stories of the murders were exaggerated.
A military court in Budapest will now decide Kepiro's fate.
It will determine whether he will be jailed immediately or
made the subject of a new investigation for war crimes and
murder.
Upon my return home, I found a message that made the whole
agonizing effort worthwhile. In response to the story of
Kepiro's exposure, a woman named Chava Schick, of Kibbutz
Lehavot Haviva, had posted the following on the Ynet website: "As
someone who was there at age 5 with my twin sister and my
family.... Kol hakavod to those who tried for all these years
and finally succeeded in exposing this terrible murderer...especially
during the period of the Days of Awe.”
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